Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Comics & Sports #2: Dash Dartwell Redux

As all geeks (looking at you, Chuck from the NBC series, which is also called Chuck) know, every Wednesday (and Thursdays when Monday was a holiday or something) is that most hallowed of days, new comic book day. In the spirit of that most beautiful of days, I present a feature spotlighting the potentially awesome confluence of sports and comics.

Last week, I promised the following...

Join us next Wednesday for another Comics & Sports entry where our friend Dash will use his tablets to hit more home runs. No, seriously. I swear that's actually going to happen.

Now, I might as well make a confession: I hadn't exactly read that particular comic yet. I was pretty sure that would happen, but I wasn't sure. What if he only threw a no-hitter and didn't hit any home runs? That wouldn't nearly be unbelievably ironic enough. But don't touch that blog dial, comics and/or sports fans, because I should have known Dash Dartwell always delivers. And how!

But first, let's remember just who young Dashford is. From today's comic:

Dash Dartwell is now the miracle man of the athletic world because of his new and astonishing records set with the help of Professor Moss’s metabo-accelerator pills, which speed up all the life processes and give their user unbelievable speed. Dash can dodge bullets and outdistance speeding cars – until the pill’s effect is over.

So yeah, he's everybody's favorite juicer. Last week he used his abilities to rewrite track and field records. And now...baseball. It's the big game between Dash's Dravrah College and its archrival Elay (if you're confused, read those names backwards), and just like with the track meet, a bunch of mobsters have nothing better to do than fix the game in the least subtle way imaginable...



Seriously, "brainy" is the best adjective to describe a guy who guarantees a loss by kidnapping the best five guys on the team? This makes Mr. Burns's team of ringers look downright inconspicuous. Except for Mattingly's sideburns, of course. Those things are fucking visible from space.



Sorry about the quality on some of these; this is what seven decades of obscurity will do to you (just ask the Hawley-Smoot Tariff, which at one point was actually a tariff instead of the reference for things that are boring). In case you can't read that, the coach asks, "What do we do?"

In this situation, and I must admit I'm not a trained kidnapping expert, I would probably, you know, call the police. I mean, it's not like the note makes any demands or anything. All it says is that they've been kidnapped so they can't play. You'd sort of think, under the circumstances, that might be grounds to postpone the game. Of course, the availability of the world's fastest man might well skew the standard operating procedure when it comes to kidnapping. I mean, it could.



"Do whatever you do to build up this speed of yours." I believe you can find that on Tony LaRussa's family crest. It's like this comic was written before they invented the concept of accountability. So, what, before 2005? Yeah, I'm going to go with 2005.



Just in case you thought there was the slightest chance Dash didn't know exactly what he's doing. Again, this was apparently in no way considered cheating in the 1940's. I dunno, maybe the war had something to do with it. And you know what? If one last invasion of France will stop all the anti-steroid sanctimony, I think I'm OK with that. More than OK, actually.

Anyway, proving once again that there's no problem you can't solve with kidnapping, the gangsters try to capture Dash as well. But they somehow didn't count on the world's fastest man running away...



Wow, Dash easily outran a car driving at 115 miles per hour? Let me do a little math here (and by "let me", I of course mean Google will do it all for me)...

Call Dash's speed 130 miles per hour. That's the equivalent of 58.1152 meters per second. That means he could complete a 100-meter dash in 1.72 seconds. Makes his last recorded speed of 3.5 seconds look positively slow. Of course, he might be getting a little wind assistance. Maybe. Or would running at that sort of speed pretty much by definition create a tailwind? You'd really think two years of high school physics would have taught me more than this. Oh well, that's the failure of the American public school system for you. Nobody's worked out how to outsource sports blogging yet, right?

In any event, Dash finally gets to the game...



Again, how the hell is this not bad sportsmanship? Or are you allowed to have one juicer if your three best sluggers and two best pitchers get kidnapped? Is that the ethical equation here? I just hope somebody was thinking about the children. Never mind the obvious homosexuality of Batman and Robin corrupting the nation's youth, this comic is clearly responsible for warping the judgment of a bunch of kids who were born about twenty years after this was published. Prove me wrong, people!

Incidentally, why do you need to kidnap two pitchers for one game? I mean, even if they're both aces, the guys in the first panel acted as though both of them would be huge factors in the upcoming game. And considering we're still a decade away from Hoyt Wilhelm, I'm not sure it makes sense for one of them to be a reliever. You know, I'm pretty much completely certain the fondest wish of this comic's writer was to have some asshole nitpick the story's internal logic sixty-seven years after it was written. I know that's what I'm hoping for. Get to it, sentient death blogs of 2075!

Wait, did I just come up with the title and premise of Japan's next big anime? I'm going to say...yes. Yes I did.



And so, with the pills working again, Dash turns into what Jose Canseco so desperately wanted to be: an all-pitching, all-slugging drugged-up super-athlete. To think he didn't even need to blow out his elbow to do it! Truly, he is science's greatest miracle. Or he's just a slimmer version of early career Babe Ruth. Whichever you prefer.

But let's not forget those wacky gangsters! With Dash coming up to bat, even these guys have to admit kidnapping isn't really an option. So they go for the only option more blatantly illegal: shooting Dash in a crowded stadium. With a machine gun.



Shouldn't somebody...anybody...be reacting to one of the baseball players throwing a bat at a guy in the stands who was just brandishing a machine gun? Is Dravrah winning really so incredibly exciting that it makes everyone forget that just happened? Or does that sort of thing just not faze any of them?

I'm starting to see what Tom Brokaw was talking about. Maybe these forties fuckers really were the greatest generation.



Oh that Rojas...truly the weasely Brian McNamee to the gangster's assholish Roger Clemens. I guess that makes Dash the George Mitchell in this analogy. And why not?

With the baseball game out the way, it's time for a little skull-busting. Predictably, Dash works fast.



Damn right! Forget ending human misery when there are so many more sports of which Dash hasn't yet made a complete mockery! How about 2,000 yards...in a game? Or 100 points...in a quarter? Or the hockey equivalent of those things!?

And, lest we forget, Dash hasn't even begun to explore the perverted applications of super-speed. Sure, it's no invisibility, but where there's a perverted will, there is always a way.

And let that be today's lesson.

That's all for now with our pal Dash, but join us next Wednesday when we look at another superhero in a story actually devised by a member of the Washington Redskins. And no, to our eternal regret, not Chris Cooley.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Oh man, I hope it's Joe Theismann. That man just screams creativity.